Diving headlong into it.

Tweet

Thirty-seven years ago today I moved from Paris to Belfast, a sad day indeed. Our baby son was six weeks old and we drove to the coast to get a boat to England then drove up to Wales to get a boat to Ireland. With that nostalgic cloud of melancholy hanging over me I set myself up for a double dose, a great, headlong fall into something like a green soup of despair, by taking refuge in the collection of short stories Camus wrote when he was twenty-two years old. I’ve never wallowed in melancholy quite so sweet and comforting as that found in these little gems, never read anything so tender. Even now, after setting the book aside, I can still hear footsteps on a gravel drive and the long, slow moan of the ocean washing against the Algerian shore. I can smell mimosa, cigarettes, and sense the shadows of a gently moving tree on a net curtain. I can taste poverty and nothingness and a deep sense of unnameable identity. I see a blue curl of cigarette smoke reaching up to the ceiling and hear the faint yelp of a kitten dying for want of milk which its mother’s dry teats cannot produce.